Farewell To The Summer

Dear Eloise is a lo-fi, noisy, borderline shoegaze bedroom-pop duo from Beijing. Though this string of adjectives could describe any number of Western acts, Dear Eloise is one of the few of its kind in China, taking the bedroom recording paradigm to its logical extreme: they have never performed live, and never will. Dear Eloise makes private music casually offered for personal consumption. The band, formed in 2008, is the duo of P.K.14 vocalist Yang Haisong and his wife, Sun Xia, P.K.14’s original bassist. On Dear Eloise’s latest full-length, Farewell to the Summer, as with most of the band’s output, Yang hangs in the background. He can be heard on guitar, bass, and drums, crafting the band’s signature blend of buzzsaw guitar fuzz and delicately interwoven, one-string melodies. Compared to their earlier output — two LPs and a string of vinyl singles — Farewell to the Summer is slower, sadder. Sun Xia’s vocals are as ethereal and world-weary as ever, ripening with time like leaves slowly losing their summer green. She’s joined at times by Yang in plaintive duet, as on “Scenery”, a haunting tune that passes the listener by like half-glimpsed city lights through a fogged car window. Farewell to the Summer is both departure and progress for Dear Eloise. It manages to retain all of band’s trademark mystique while defining the gauzy edges of their mood-lit aesthetic with more halting clarity than ever before.